The latter half of the eighteenth century owes a heavy debt to Sir Joshua, so too do we who turn to his many canvases for a glimpse of the men who bore rule and the women they delighted to honour--or dishonour. He has preserved for us all that was notable--statesmen, soldiers, sailors, churchmen, men of letters, actors, fair women, frail women, delightful children--they are all there, and if we cannot see them all quite in their habit as they lived, there is enough left to give a very fair idea. The modern market carefully nursed by a ring of astute professionals will give almost any price for portraits of fair women by Sir Joshua, though it may be suggested that his greatest success was in the treatment of men or at least that he saw far more in men than in women. But Reynolds had not studied classic figures for nothing, he could give his fair sitters some suggestion of direct association with those goddesses of old time whom he had admired in Italy, and to this treatment no exception was taken. It is very rarely that Reynolds makes his women human. Nellie O'Brien, whose portrait hangs in the Wallace Collection, is one of the exceptions, and an attempt is made to make the "Duchess of Devonshire and Child," now at Chatsworth, equally feminine, but one cannot escape the thought that the mother's gesture as expressed on the canvas is altogether exceptional. She could not have played for long with such a strong healthy baby without ruffling the delightful costume or the carefully arranged hair, and this, one feels, would have been unendurable. Turn, on the other hand, to the portraits of the men--how significantly their faces speak of their outstanding habits, labours or desires. Few people could see so closely into his sitters as Sir Joshua did, though in very many cases they were not with him for more than a couple of days. Yet he seemed able in that short time to enter into their life history to produce something that was a fine portrait and yet more than a portrait--a psychological study, not over elaborated, not insisted upon, not in any way intruding upon the purely artistic side of the work, but there, nevertheless, to be seen to-day by those who have eyes to see. To quote his own words, he looked upon his sitters "with a dilated eye"; there was just enough imagination to give an attractive setting to the essentials; there was no need for the classical or symbolical background to whose doubtful charms the painter surrendered now and again, but we may consider that these affectations were a part of the art of his time, and that, while he left many conventions behind him, he could not trample upon them all.